Facing Unpleasant Facts (39 page)

I base these generalisations on what I can recall of my own childhood outlook. Treacherous though memory is, it seems to me the chief means we have of discovering how a child's mind works. Only by resurrecting our own memories can we realise how incredibly distorted is the child's vision of the world. Consider this, for example. How would St. Cyprian's appear to me now, if I could go back, at my present age, and see it as it was in 1915 ? What should I think of Sambo and Flip, those terrible, all-powerful monsters? I should see them as a couple of silly, shallow, ineffectual people, eagerly clambering up a social ladder which any thinking person could see to be on the point of collapse. I would no more be frightened of them than I would be frightened of a dormouse. Moreover, in those days they seemed to me fantastically old, whereas—though of this I am not certain—I imagine they must have been somewhat younger than I am now. And how would Cliffy Burton appear, with his blacksmith's arms and his red, jeering face? Merely a scruffy little boy, barely distinguishable from hundreds of other scruffy little boys. The two sets of facts can lie side by side in my mind, because those happen to be my own memories. But it would be very difficult for me to see with the eyes of any other child, except by an effort of the imagination which might lead me completely astray. The child and the adult live in different worlds. If that is so, we cannot be certain that school, at any rate boarding school, is not still for many children as dreadful an experience as it used to be. Take away God, Latin, the cane, class distinctions and sexual taboos, and the fear, the hatred, the snobbery and the misunderstanding might still all be there. It will have been seen that my own main trouble was an utter lack of any sense of proportion or probability. This led me to accept outrages and believe absurdities, and to suffer torments
over things which were in fact of no importance. It is not enough to say that I was "silly" and "ought to have known better." Look back into your own childhood and think of the nonsense you used to believe and the trivialities which could make you suffer. Of course my own case had its individual variations, but essentially it was that of countless other boys. The weakness of the child is that it starts with a blank sheet. It neither understands nor questions the society in which it lives, and because of its credulity other people can work upon it, infecting it with the sense of inferiority and the dread of offending against mysterious, terrible laws. It may be that everything that happened to me at St. Cyprian's could happen in the most "enlightened" school, though perhaps in subtler forms. Of one thing, however, I do feel fairly sure, and that is that boarding schools are worse than day schools. A child has a better chance with the sanctuary of its home near at hand. And I think the characteristic faults of the English upper and middle classes may be partly due to the practice, general until recently, of sending children away from home as young as nine, eight or even seven.

I have never been back to St. Cyprian's. Reunions, old boys' dinners and such-like leave me something more than cold, even when my memories are friendly. I have never even been down to Eton, where I was relatively happy, though I did once pass through it in 1933 and noted with interest that nothing seemed to have changed, except that the shops now sold radios. As for St. Cyprian's, for years I loathed its very name so deeply that I could not view it with enough detachment to see the significance of the things that happened to me there. In a way, it is only within the last decade that I have really thought over my schooldays, vividly though their memory has always haunted me. Nowadays, I believe, it would make very little impression on me to see the place again, if it still exists. (I remember hearing a rumour some years
ago that it had been burnt down.) If I had to pass through Eastbourne I would not make a detour to avoid the school: and if I happened to pass the school itself I might even stop for a moment by the low brick wall, with the steep bank running down from it, and look across the flat playing field at the ugly building with the square of asphalt in front of it. And if I went inside and smelt again the inky, dusty smell of the big schoolroom, the rosiny smell of the chapel, the stagnant smell of the swimming bath and the cold reek of the lavatories, I think I should only feel what one invariably feels in revisiting any scene of childhood: How small everything has grown, and how terrible is the deterioration in myself!

The Spike

1. "And there is nothing left remarkable / Beneath the visiting moon"; Cleopatra's response to Antony's death,
Antony and Cleopatra,
4.15.67–68.a

Clink

1. Clink is a cant word for a prison, from the Clink, one-time prison in the London borough of Southwark dating from the sixteenth century.

2. Lord Kylsant (1863–1937), a Conservative MP, Chairman of the Royal Mail Steam Package Company, and with large shipbuilding interests, was sentenced to twelve months' imprisonment in 1931 for circulating a false prospectus. His personal guilt was never entirely established in the public mind.

3. His lodgings at 2 Windsor Street, Paddington, near St. Mary's Hospital. The house has been demolished.

My Country Right or Left

1. The title of the essay adopts Stephen Decatur's "Toast Given at Norfolk" (Virginia, 1816), "My country, right or wrong."

2. The slogan dates from 1909.

3. On August 23,1939, Germany and the Soviet Union signed, in the persons of Ribbentrop and Molotov, a nonaggression pact in Moscow, completely reversing the balance of relationships in Europe. A secret protocol provided for the partition of Poland between the signatories. Hitler was informed of the signing of an Anglo-Polish agreement at 4:30 p.m. on August 25 and three hours later cancelled an order given at 3 :00 p.m. for his troops to invade Poland. The invasion was postponed until September 1, 1939.

War-time Diary

1. There were at this time three London evening papers:
Star, Evening News,
and
Evening Standard.

2. British Expeditionary Force, the troops in France at the time of that country's fall to the Germans.

3. Eileen Blair, Orwell's wife.

4. Alfred Duff Cooper (1890–1954; Viscount Norwich, 1952) was a Conservative politician, diplomat, and author.

5. A Socialist weekly to which Orwell contributed many reviews and essays.

6. The Communist Party's daily newspaper in Britain.

7. The journal of the British Union of Fascists.

8. In May, Max Aitken, first Baron Beaverbrook (1879–1964), the Canadian newspaper proprietor, had been made minister of aircraft production by Churchill.

9. Dr. Franz Borkenau (1900–1957), Austrian sociologist and political "writer, born in Vienna, was from 1921 to 1929 a member of the German Communist Party. For his conversations with Orwell at the time of Dunkirk, see above and Orwell's War-time Diary,
65, 6.6.40.

10. Cyril Connolly (1903–1974) was with Orwell at St. Cyprian's and Eton. They met again in 1935, and were associated in a number of literary activities, particularly
Horizon,
which Connolly edited.

11. Unidentified.

12. "Eric," abbreviated from his second name, was the name by which Eileen Blair's much-loved brother, Laurence Frederick O'Shaughnessy, was known. He was a distinguished chest and heart surgeon, joined the Royal Army Medical Corps at the outbreak of war, and was killed tending the wounded on the beaches of Dunkirk.

13. Eamon de Valera (1882–1975), Irish political leader, was at this time prime minister of the Irish Free State.

14. A popular Sunday newspaper.

15. Margot Asquith (1864–1945) was the widow of Herbert Henry Asquith, Earl of Oxford and Asquith, who was prime minister 1906–1916.

16. These figures were, in fact, correct. Although most of their equipment was lost, 198,000 British and 140,000 mainly French and Belgian soldiers were evacuated. Of the forty-one naval vessels involved, six were sunk and nineteen damaged. About 220,000 servicemen were evacuated from ports in Normandy and Brittany.

17. "Suppressed" implies censorship; such posters were forbidden simply to conserve raw materials and economize on imports, thereby saving shipping space.

18. Sir Stafford Cripps (1889–1952), lawyer and labour politician, was ambassador to the Soviet Union, 1940–1942, and minister of aircraft production, 1942–1945.

19. Orwell eventually did so, in "As I Please," 42,
Tribune,
September 15, 1944.

20. Local Defence Volunteers, later the Home Guard. Orwell joined on June 12 what became C Company, 5th County of London Battalion, and was soon promoted to sergeant, with ten men to instruct. He took his duties very seriously.

21. Marylebone Cricket Club, the body that then controlled national and international cricket.

22. A working-class constituency in the East End of London.

23. George Lansbury (1859–1940), leader of the Labour Party, 1931–1935, was a pacifist and resigned as leader on that issue.

24. Juan Negrín (1889–1956) was Socialist prime minister of the Republic of Spain, September 1936—March 1938. He fled to France where he died in exile.

25. Milton,
Paradise Lost,
iv, 110.

26. Orwell had signed the contract for publication of
Coming Up for Air
just three days before war broke out; the book remained unpublished by Albatross.

27. Victor William (Peter) Watson (1908–1956), a rich young man who, after much travel, decided, about 1939, to devote his life to the arts, was cofounder with his friend Cyril Connolly of the magazine
Horizon,
which he financed and also provided all the material for the art section. He was always an admirer of Orwell's writing.

28. The Hon. Unity Valkyrie Mitford (1914–1948), fourth daughter of the second Lord Redesdale, was, from 1934, when she first met Hitler, his admirer. In January 1940 she was brought back to England from Germany suffering from bullet wounds in the head. Thereafter she lived in retirement.

29. Possibly Michael, the owner of the small clothing factory mentioned in Orwell's diary entry of
3.9.40;
see
95.

30. Gwen O'Shaughnessy, Eileen's sister-in-law. In the early stages of the war, there was a government-sponsored scheme to evacuate children to Canada and the United States. Gwen's son, Laurence, nineteen months old in June 1940, went to Canada on one of the last ships to take evacuees before the evacuee ship
City of Benares
was sunk in the Atlantic.

31. "New
Statesman
" seems probable here.

32. Probably Richard Crossman (1907–1974), scholar, intellectual, journalist, and left-wing politician, who was assistant editor of
The New Statesman,
1938–1955, and Labour MP, 1945–1970.

33. The British 146th Infantry Brigade landed at Namsos, Norway, on the coast some 300 miles north of Oslo, on April 16–17, 1940. They withdrew May 2–3. The last Allied forces left Norway on June 9.

34. Aneurin (Nye) Bevan (1897–1960) was a Labour MP and a director of
Tribune
when Orwell wrote for that journal, and allowed Orwell complete freedom to say what he wished against current party policy. G. R. Strauss (1901–1993, Life Peer, 1979) was a Labour MP and codirector of
Tribune.

35. Neville Chamberlain (1869–1940). Conservative prime minister associated with the appeasement of Hitler, though he initiated the rearmament of Britain. Chamberlain's government fell on May 10, 1940, and a coalition government under Winston Churchill was formed. Magnanimously, Churchill included Chamberlain in his cabinet.

36. Rayner Heppenstall.

37. "Unblimping" was a frequent concern of Orwell's. See, for example, "War-time Diary,"
92, 23.8.40.

38. Not certainly identified. Possibly Richard Crossman again (see
n. 32
above) or Cyril Connolly.

39. See "My Country Right or Left,"
52–58.

40. Jean Chiappe (1878–1940), Corsican head of the Paris police, 1927–1934, was pro-Fascist and responsible for severely repressive measures against the left. For Orwell on Chiappe's death, see
107.

41. Henri Philippe Pétain (1856–1951), successful defender of Verdun in 1916, which led to his being regarded as a national hero, was created a marshal of France in 1918. He became premier in 1940, presided over the defeat and dismemberment of France by the Germans, and led the occupied zone's Vichy government until war's end. He was tried for collaboration with the Nazis and sentenced to death. President De Gaulle commuted his sentence to solitary confinement for life.

42. Pierre Laval (1883–1945) held various offices in French governments and was premier 1931–1932 and 1935–1936. He left the Socialist Party in 1920 and gradually moved to the extreme right. On January 7,1935, as foreign minister, he signed an agreement with Mussolini that backed Italian claims to areas of Abyssinia (Ethiopia) in return for Italian support against German intervention in Austria. Italy invaded Abyssinia on October 3, 1935, and on December 18 the British foreign secretary, Sir Samuel Hoare (1880–1959, Viscount Templewood, 1944), was forced to resign when it was revealed that he had entered into a pact with Laval appeasing Mussolini. After the fall of France, Laval came to represent treacherous collaboration. He even provided Frenchmen for work in German industry. Tried in 1945, he was executed after failing in a suicide attempt.

43. Pierre-Étienne Flandin (1889–1958) held numerous offices in French governments. He was premier 1934–1935, and foreign minister in Pétains government in 1940, but attempted to resist German demands and was replaced by Laval. He was forbidden to participate in public life after the war.

44. Eileen Blair and Gwen O'Shaughnessy, her sister-in-law.

45. Probably Mrs. Anderson, who cleaned for the Orwells in Wallington. Although Orwell had, by the time this was written, been living in London for five or six weeks, he still visited Wallington.